Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on the 8th Sunday after Trinity, 10th August 2014
Acts 14:8-20

I went to two memorials this week. The first one was to remember the start of the First World War, to give thanks for the self-sacrifice and bravery of the people from this community who served in that war.

The second was much more personal. It followed a Nigerian custom that, if a person dies, they hold a memorial service for them ten years later, ‘ten years on’, to recall them to mind and to celebrate their lives. They were a charming young couple who had come to St Andrew’s about the time of the Millennium, with a couple of small children. Both originally from Nigeria, but brought up in England. Rather glamorous, successful young people. I had begun to know them slightly, over coffee after the 10 o’clock service.

Then, at the age of 38, with absolutely no warning, he had an asthma attack which brought out a latent defect in his heart, and, despite the hospital’s best efforts, he died. It must have been terribly tough for his widow; and it was terribly tough again, earlier this week, when she was called upon to deliver a tribute to him in the service and to play host at a fine reception afterwards, to celebrate his life. He would have been very proud of her.

The First World War commemoration was in a sense a commemoration of something which didn’t really make sense: and for sure, the second was commemorating someone who had been taken away far too young. No logic, no justification for what happened, there either.

Although, in relation to the First World War, you can say that there were important principles at stake, upholding alliances, protecting weaker countries against aggression, and so on, there was no big, overriding reason for it, like the fight against Nazism in the Second World War.

The First World War was said to be ‘the war to end all wars’: but quite patently, this was not true. We are still surrounded by warlike behaviour, the resort to force and violence, when reason has failed.

In Gaza, we are invited to support the Disasters Emergency Committee’s appeal for rebuilding and relief. I hope that we will all be generous, because the need is huge. But it did occur to me, when I heard the appeal being made on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee on the wireless, that it is extraordinary that Israel is not being asked to pay for the damage which it has done.

Israel is a rich nation, with one of the most powerful armies in the world. They have destroyed large parts of Gaza, in circumstances where it is doubtful whether they had any right to do so in international law. Will the Palestinians be able to send the Israelis a bill? I hope so. But I rather doubt it. It would be nice to think that the International Court of Justice could entertain a claim for damages.

Some people locally have been giving to support a Palestinian village, Wadi Fuqeen. Wadi Fuqeen is at the bottom of a hill, in a valley. At the top is an Israeli ‘settlement’, illegally built. Not only does the settlement – and by the way, you shouldn’t think in terms of some kind of pioneer encampment when you talk about settlements: you should instead have a picture of something like Milton Keynes – not only does the settlement divert away most of the water which used to feed the village of Wadi Fuqeen, but also they have arranged their sewage system so that the outfall flows over the fields farmed by the villagers. And of course the so-called security barrier – the wall – passes between the fields, where the village farmers work, and their houses where they live. So even if you do have some unpolluted agricultural land, it will take you a long time to reach it.

None of this, of course, justifies Hamas firing rockets at the Israelis: but I think you can understand the frustration and sense of injustice which might have prompted them to do it. I believe that there are many other stories like that of Wadi Fuqeen in Palestine.

The common feature of all these episodes is that, when diplomacy fails, when people haven’t persuaded each other by normal rhetoric and argument, then they may well resort to violence.

It’s interesting that St Paul on his missionary journey, from Antioch to Iconium and then to Lystra and Derbe, had a disagreement, a running disagreement, with some of the Jews that he met on the way. He was a travelling preacher, and his practice was to preach in the local synagogue.

He came into conflict, not only with devout Jews, but also religious competitors, competitors for the title of being true prophets. It’s interesting how St Paul dealt with them. We don’t get descriptions of him having some kind of Socratic dialogue with his opponents, at the end of which they were persuaded by rational argument. Instead, when he came across Elymas, the false prophet, the magus, the seer relied upon by the Roman governor, he didn’t try to persuade him, but instead he just made him temporarily blind (Acts 13). It may be that, if he could do this, he was thinking of his own temporary blindness, which of course was the prelude to his coming to faith in Jesus. So perhaps he hoped that the same thing would happen to Elymas.

Then when he was about to preach to the people at Lystra, which in Greek folklore was supposed to be a place where the ancient gods, like Jupiter and Mercury, had lived, instead of simply offering reasoning and argument, he started off by doing a miracle. He healed the crippled man.

It doesn’t seem to take us any nearer to finding an answer to the big question which keeps coming up today. How can we resolve disputes and differences, especially when they concern where your home is, where you live, what laws you obey – or which god you worship?

The depressing thing is that it always seems to come back to violence. Even for poor St Paul. At the end of our lesson in Acts 14, it’s almost mentioned in passing, but nevertheless it happened, that some Jews who had followed him from Antioch and Iconium, cornered him; they stoned him and left him for dead.

It doesn’t bear thinking about, the mechanics of what must have happened. St Paul must either have been protected by God, or have been unbelievably lucky, because miraculously he survived. It’s not claimed as a sort of resurrection event, but it must have looked like a miracle to the Christian congregation.

What Paul preached was not a clever argument, not conventional wisdom: he said, ‘We bring you good news, that you should turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.’ [Acts 14:14].The true God had showed Himself, had showed that ‘he has not left you without some clue to his nature, in the kindness he shows: he sends you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons, and gives you food and good cheer in plenty’. [Acts 14:17, NEB]

When I think about my friend’s commemoration of her late husband, it shows how what Paul preached about can work. How did the young widow with two small children cope with the loss of her husband before he was 40? How has she found the strength, over the last ten years, to bring those two children up so well – one is just starting in the sixth form, and the other has passed the exams and takes up a place at St John’s this September?

How did you do it? I asked her once. It was so unfair – why did it have to be her husband? But she said quietly, ‘My faith really helped.’ She trusts in God. She prays. It’s not easy. But her prayers are answered.

We mustn’t forget God, when these crises press in on us. In Gaza, what would Jesus say? What does God want us to do? God said, ‘Thou shalt not kill’: Jesus added the generous words of the Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. So Israel must not automatically retaliate, if the Palestinians in desperation fire off old Soviet Grad rockets, which the Israeli Iron Dome anti-missile defence system easily intercepts. Israel must not automatically retaliate, still less retaliate with overwhelming force.

But how can we get this message through to them? Just as Paul didn’t try to reason, so much as to bring in God’s power, to demonstrate His presence, so we must pray for the Holy Spirit to bring these warring parties out of their blindness. We Christians have a distinctive message to give, which in a sense is not logical. It must no longer be OK to reciprocate, to hit back. Violence does not change people’s minds. The point about Gaza is not really about whether a particular action taken in retaliation was ‘proportionate’. It is that any retaliation is wrong.

In these most important areas, perhaps there is no real logic. War is chaos.

‘Thou whose almighty Word
Chaos and darkness heard,
And took their flight;
Hear us, we humbly pray,
And where the Gospel-day
Sheds not its glorious ray,
Let there be light!’ [J. Marriott]

Our task as Christians is to keep sending this message of peace, to keep listening to the word of God in church and in prayer. Whoever is hurt, whoever is in need; whoever has lost their home: they are our neighbours.

Roger McCormick and his colleagues in what is to become the ‘CCP Foundation’ (see http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/conductcosts/contacts-2/) have produced research which shows that fines and damages paid and estimated for misconduct, in the 10 banks which they have studied, in the last 5 years have amounted to £157 billion worldwide. In the UK alone this amounts, on average, to nearly £6 billion per annum.

These figures are now being analysed further to identify whether any of the banks under review are improving their performance: and to identify criteria by which performance in this area can be compared, across different countries, markets and types of bank.

It is however clear that conduct costs, or rather the cost of misconduct, are a very significant impost on the cost of trade and the efficiency of the banking system, and are therefore, as a matter of public policy, a mischief which urgently calls for a remedy. Indeed even the bankers themselves recognise that there is an urgent need for public trust in their activities to be restored.

Given that such misconduct is clearly a bad thing, how is it to be stopped? McCormick tells a story to bankers and others at his seminars. Imagine you are on one side of a transaction, and you notice that your counterparty has made a serious mistake, which they have not noticed. The result of the mistake is that you will do much better out of the transaction than you would have done if the other side had not made their mistake.

What do you do? Keep silent and pocket the profit, or point out the mistake – and get what you would reasonably have expected to get out of the transaction, but no more?

Today, McCormick has said, many of those, to whom he puts the story, find it difficult to answer. It might be thought that their chief objective is to make money, to maximise profit. It is not part of their objective to do this in an ethical way. Instead, their only thought of ethical considerations is whether they will, by acting in a particular way, lay themselves open to regulatory sanction. The criterion is not whether it is bad to do something, but whether a policeman will catch me if I do it.

But regulators, almost by definition, offer no solution: we are, after all, trying to reduce the amount of fines and penalties. If we simply say that regulators should regulate less strictly, it would reduce the fines, but it would not necessarily improve the conduct. (We can observe in passing that in identifying the mischief which is banking misconduct, we have defined it by the amount it costs rather than by its moral badness – but it nevertheless remains a serious mischief.)

What is to be done? Lawyers will be familiar with the alleged antithesis between what is lawful, and what is morally right. The existence of that antithesis is, it could be said, a major factor in facilitating banking misconduct. It might look as though bankers’ conduct is determined not by any consideration whether something is morally right, but rather whether it is legally permitted – or whether, even if it is unlawful, whether there is a risk of being caught out by a regulator.

It seems that the only way to obviate conduct costs entirely is to improve conduct – morally. If it were true that a course of action needed to be both lawful and morally right, this would leave no room for moral arbitrage of the kind which McCormick’s story brings out.

How can this be brought about? I suggest that, as well as experts in the upholding of professional standards – such as members of the International Accounting Standards Committee, say – it would be helpful to invite the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to widen the scope of his activity, for example in the St Paul’s Institute, so as to include advice to and involvement with the Conduct Costs Project.

Hugh D Bryant
Reader (Licensed Lay Minister) in the Church of England; former Solicitor and Marine Underwriter

Sermon for Evensong on the Third Sunday after Trinity, 6th July 2014 at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon
Luke 18:31-19:10

When I was little, I was rather puzzled in Sunday School and in scripture lessons at school, when we came across Bible references to ‘publicans and sinners’ (the exact phrase comes in Luke 15:1 – KJV). I know that modern Bibles translate ‘publican’ as ‘tax gatherer’ or ‘tax collector’, but in the Authorised Version, which is the one I grew up with, they are called ‘publicans’.

Maybe it was my Methodist upbringing, but for a long time I thought that the Bible had it in for pub landlords – presumably, because they allowed the dreaded alcohol to be taken on their premises.

In time I learned the correct meaning. ‘Publican’ comes from publicanus in Latin: somebody who looks after publicum, the public, or state, revenue.

But I was still to some extent puzzled, why tax collectors should be singled out as being automatically, by their very nature, sinful. ‘. when the Pharisees saw it, [they asked], “Why does your master eat with publicans and sinners?” Matt.9:11, KJV.

And here is the same thing, in the context of Jesus eating with Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus the superintendent of tax gatherers. However much one may hate paying tax, it does seem extreme to equate being a tax gatherer with being a sinner, just because of what you do for a living.

Even the people who were tax gatherers, publicans, acknowledged the fact that they were sinners. Think of the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, both saying their prayers. The Pharisee prayed, ‘God I thank thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican …’ The publican would only say, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner’ (Luke 18:11,13, KJV).

It’s not obvious what the sin involved in being a tax gatherer was. It doesn’t seem to contravene any of the Ten Commandments. The Romans had privatised the business of tax collection in what we would recognise as a rather modern way. Publicans had to bid for franchises, the right to collect taxes in a particular place. They weren’t paid a salary. So long as they paid over to the Roman governor the amount assessed for their district, whatever they made on top, they could keep.

That made them uniquely reprehensible to their fellow Jews. I don’t think we would feel very warmly towards tax inspectors if they’d been privatised. Imagine – you might have a special division of Wonga, or nPower, collecting your tax. Instead of the tax office simply collecting what the government had decreed should be your tax liability, the Wonga Tax Division would charge a steep uplift on top of the basic tax price. Because they had negotiated an exclusive franchise for collection of tax in Stoke D’Abernon, say, there would be nothing you could do about it. You would have to stand idly by while these people made huge profits out of something which you might well think ought to be a government function.

So they were hated; so much so, that just being a publican, being a tax collector, was equated with being bad, with being sinful. Perhaps Zacchaeus had heard that when Jesus met Matthew, he had enjoyed a meal which had been attended by a lot of tax-gatherers. So Zacchaeus might have inferred that Jesus wasn’t automatically opposed to tax gatherers (see Matt. 9:10-11).

In a way, you might think it was a bit strange that Zacchaeus, being a top tax man and rich, would cast aside his dignity, run ahead of the crowd and climb up into a tree. Of course some people do clamber up into inaccessible places in order to get a better view of some VIP coming by. I wonder whether we’ll see people climbing into trees to get a better view of Sophie, Countess of Wessex, when she comes to open the Riverhill beautification on Wednesday afternoon.

Somehow I have a feeling that, although there will be plenty of rich people there, I don’t think they’ll be climbing up into trees. But Zacchaeus did – and Jesus spotted him in the sycamore tree. ‘Be quick and come down; I must come and stay with you today.’ (Luke 19:5). Said Jesus, ‘Because it’s imperative that I come and stay with you. [My literal translation].’ Not, ‘Would it be all right if I came and stayed with you?’ It’s an imperative; it’s necessary [δει] that I come and stay with you.

And Zacchaeus came down, and made Jesus welcome at his house. ‘He received him joyfully’, it says. But everyone who saw it ‘began to grumble’. There’s a wonderful onomatopoeic Greek word in the original here, διεγογγυζον [‘diegonguzon’]: what a wonderfully grumbly word it is! ‘διεγογγυζον’ – they muttered, they murmured, among themselves.

What they muttered was, ‘He has gone to stay with a man who is a sinner: a publican, a tax-gatherer.’ Then the story cuts to Zacchaeus’ house, because we hear – almost as though Zacchaeus knows what they are saying – that he reacts to it by doing good. The modern translation [NRSV] says he said, ‘Half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor… and if I have defrauded anyone .. I will pay back four times as much.

The Greek doesn’t say that. The Greek says, ‘I am giving [διδωμι] half my money to the poor … and I am repaying four-fold’ [αποδιδωμι τετραπλουν].

I think that’s quite important. There isn’t any conditionality to it: no if something-or-other, then I will do something. He’s saying, ‘I am doing it.’ If it was, ‘I will do it, I will give half my money to the poor, and if I have ripped anybody off I will give them back four times what they gave me’, then it would look like a sort of a bargain. Look, Jesus: if I give half my money to the poor or if I give compensation for all the exploitation I’ve done, will you let me into the Kingdom of Heaven? Will you forgive me my sins?

But that’s not what he says. Jesus has already said he wants to come and stay with him. Indeed, he must stay with him, he says; and Zacchaeus has received him gladly. So it’s not a question that Zacchaeus needs to do things, in order for Jesus to want to come to him, to be at home with him. That has already happened.

It’s more a question of how Zacchaeus reacts to Jesus being at home with him. Having Jesus in the house makes Zacchaeus want to be generous and to right the wrongs which he has done.

So this is a parable, a piece of Jesus’ teaching, not just a nice story of a little chap in a sycamore tree. If you compare Zacchaeus with the blind man, whose faith has made him whole, just earlier in the story, Zacchaeus is much more tentative. He’s not specially faithful. He’s just curious – which is why he climbs up in the tree for a better look. But he didn’t make any protestations of faith. He simply made Jesus welcome.

It’s a lesson which still holds good today. If we are open to the good news of Jesus – if we always ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’ – then we will want to follow Him. We will want to go the extra mile, to make generous charitable gifts, to face up to things we’ve done wrong, and do more than we have to, to put them right. And it doesn’t matter if we aren’t especially good people. Indeed, we could be really bad people – but Jesus will still want to come and stay. Publicans and sinners. Could one of them be one of us?